More inspiration from the Make It show

The other week, the Make It show came to Farnborough and I spent a day there. One of the workshops I attended was an encaustic painting class. Now, in the dim and distant past, I used to do a lot of encaustic painting. my Dad and I learned together, and shared books, tips and videos, but when he passed away 15 years ago, I lost my enthusiasm for it. I still have all the kit, though, and thought that a refresher lesson might help me to get back into it again.

If you've never met encaustic art before, it involves melting hot wax onto the sole plate of an iron, and then applying the iron to glossy card in different ways to get different effects. One of the beauties of it is that you can never be exactly certain how it will turn out - you can use the colours you choose to guide your design in a certain direction, but the finished result will be different every time.

My samples from the show made three very different designs - a landscape, an underwater scene and a rough, stormy sea. I spent this morning making them into cards.

For the first one, I simply matted it with cardstock that echoed the colours of the flowers in the foreground:

The next is an underwater scene, and as well as matting it, I added a cute little die-cut whale from the X-cut set I won a couple of weeks ago at Pixie's Snippets Playground

For the third and final one, I added a die cut pirate ship from the same set, and used some wave-effect patterned paper as a background

The really satisfying thing is that all the papers and card used in them came out of my snippets box - I didn't have to cut into a single new sheet, so I feel as if I've made these cards out of nothing at all! (Well, apart from the adhesives and actual cards, that is!)

Having used so many scraps, I'm sharing this with

Pixies Snippets Playground week 167
Clear It Out Challenge - Anything Goes